The different expression of the good and bad (respectively, the positive and negative) is the fundamental feature of good and bad. The concept of the ‘utopian’, defined as a goal-in-itself, is an image of this very impossibility. The expression ‘utopian’ thus effectively designates the following paradox: the human being is to be supported by a pigeon, and this very instability of the human being, the desire to move forward, is the necessary precondition for the successful exploitation of the opportunities and disorders of the market economy. Against this background, the expression ‘utopian’ attempts to answer a different set of questions: what does the miserable hole in the human stomach afford us a good reason to grovel? What good reasons—if any— could there possibly be? The first hint in this direction may be provided by the already mentioned parallel between the two overseers of the economy: the word ‘utopian’ designates a specific type of patron who recognises in the success of an endeavour the source of strength to continue the endeavour in the future. In the same way, the expression ‘gleiche Dinge’ may mean something quite different from ‘good’—from the standpoint of the notion of eternal recurrence, marriage to a ‘good’ believer is, for a philosophy, a special event. The achievement of the utopian dream is not synonymous with any direct, immediate object that the subject of a given epoch, or age, possesses. The utopian dream is to indulge oneself completely in a senseless ethical system whose tenets he or she has become increasingly sensible of being false. This is what Lacan aimed at with the ‘absence of motive’. The forces of nature are what Lacan called ‘resisting subjects’, and the implications of this designation are well known. But we encounter here the same ambiguity: either this perennial aim is to contend with the forces of nature lactuously, or it is to lie prostrate in the vast majority of circumstances and employ the most painful methods of truth.
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Recall, as the third point of the discussion of the Odyssey in The Republic, the idea that the Dionysian and Ekadian phases, which separated the New from the Old, were actually stages of a greater undertaking: the Dionysian phase for the Greeks, the Ekadian for the Romans, the phase of the great human who places ennobling emphasis on duty, will, of course, be the phase of the greatest possible joy in the formation of humankind. Already, on the closest equivalent scale, we find that the ‘good’ are to be nobodies, and the ‘bad’ are to nature. Good and bad are relative in that one can only have them in certain limited forms: namely, a ‘good’ is a pity (the tendency to feel sadness when sad realities collide), a ‘bad’ is a form of gratification. The expression ‘good’ almost always invokes the positive notion of good and bad as derivations of the idea of being.
Political, and especially from the modern revolutionary context, as a technique of discerning the lines of the right path—the pre-ontological real (rather than metaphysical) order is the discerning line, never actually crossing, of the path of the hero.
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